Computer systems throughout the world are becoming increasingly connected via the Internet and the World Wide Web. The World Wide Web (also referred to as simply the “Web”) is a collection of documents (commonly referred to as “Web pages”) that users can view or otherwise render and which typically include links to one or more other pages that the user can access. Web pages are hosted on a web server that is accessible to client devices via the Internet and can provide a wide range of information, such as company or personal information, product information, interactive information allowing purchases of goods or services to be made, etc.
Businesses and individuals often find it beneficial to be able to track the manner in which users use the web (e.g., what web pages are being viewed by users). Such tracking allows businesses to identify user needs and behaviors, and better provide the users with the information they desire. When companies (which may include multiple different divisions, subsidiaries, etc.) have a larger number of web servers it is beneficial for the information logged at the individual servers to be compiled into a large, centralized log. However, such compilation can prove to be troublesome at best.
Currently it can be very difficult to compile information from a large number of web servers because each web server must perform its own logging of usage, those individual logs must be accessed, and the necessary information retrieved from the logs. Given that web servers can host a large number of web pages, a very large amount of information can be logged by the individual servers (e.g., on the order of hundreds of thousands or more user accesses per day). Current technology makes it difficult and time consuming to compile such large amounts of individually collected information into a centralized location. Attempts to compile such information in a centralized log are only exacerbated by the fact that web servers can be spread across a wide geographic range (e.g., world-wide), different web servers may store different information in their individual logs, different web servers may store information in different formats, etc. Thus, it would be beneficial to provide an improved mechanism for tracking web usage across a large number of web servers.
The invention described below addresses these disadvantages, providing for centralized network usage tracking.